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""A People's History of the United States" chronicled the nation's development through voices of women, minorities and the working class, telling the American story as series of episodes where the state and big business colluded to crush socialism. American Leftists celebrated the work at a time when conservatism as embodied by President Ronald Reagan was ascendant. More than one million copies have been sold. Zinn was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1922 into a Jewish immigrant family. During the Second World War he enlisted in the US army and flew in planes that bombed targets in Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. He wrote in the magazine "The Progressive" in 2006 that his military service had informed his anti-war views. "Once we decided, at the start, that our side was the good side and the other side was evil ... we did not have to think any more. Then we could commit unspeakable acts and it was all right," Zinn said. Zinn earned a bachelor's degree from New York University in 1951 and later a master's and a doctorate in history from Columbia University in New York. Weeks before his death Zinn wrote in "The Nation" magazine of his disappointment with President Barack Obama. "I think people are dazzled by Obama's rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president - which means, in our time, a dangerous president - unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction." "